MouthyHooker

The traditional porn sites also struggle to retain payment processors and pay exorbitant transaction fees (10%+)

There has been a big crackdown recently due to the rise of Christofascism

This is definitely a thing, but I have a different take on OnlyFans in particular.

I don’t think they ever wanted to get porn off their platform. Unlike sites like Reddit and Twitter, they started as a porn site and they have always made all their money from porn. They really started raking it in during the height of COVID, and when the platform got huge, that started attracting unwanted attention from Big Banking. It’s difficult and expensive to maintain reliable credit card processing as an adult site because these big banks have very strict and ever-evolving puritanical rules about what types of content they’ll process payments for. Run afoul of these banks, lose the ability to process Visa and Mastercard, and your business is dead in the water.

By appearing to pivot away from hardcore content and aggressively promoting SFW creators, it’s easier to make the case to credit card companies that it’s not just a porn site.

OnlyFans makes an astronomical, disgusting amount of money. They know where their bread is buttered. It’s a soulless capitalist enterprise, they don’t give a shit about the “morality” or porn or anything else. Their only goal is to maximize profits, and every decision they make can and should be viewed through that lens. They don’t sell paid ads on their site so they don’t have to worry about advertisers pulling out the way sites like Reddit and Twitter do. Plus Reddit and Twitter were never making real money off adult content on their sites; we have always driven tons of traffic to their platforms but they don’t actually profit from our presence there beyond the traffic we bring, so it’s easy for them to discard us once the users are already there and invested. None of that is true for OnlyFans.

FWIW, this is not a popular take among my peers. Most seem to think OF is like the other tech companies that want to boot us once they get big enough. But I think there’s decent evidence that OF does not want to do that and will never do that. Not because they care about us or anything, but because our porn makes them hundreds of billions of dollars (probably.)

Thanks Bob Dole. Idk why my parents didn’t vote for you in the 90s

Yeah I addressed this in another comment, but this will happen if Bluesky gets big enough. That’s just the joy of being a SW! But we’ll use it until we can’t. We’re very adaptable like that because we have to be.

The reason I thought it might be relevant here is that we are pretty much always early adopters, so often the masses tend to follow us, whether they’re aware of it or not. We’ve been on there for a year or so but this is the first really big migration that I’ve personally witnessed.

My opinion as to why Switter never really took off is that a SW-specific platform is too niche. Clients/customers didn’t really follow us over. It’s super difficult to get people to switch to new platforms; Emile Torres did a great episode of Kelly Hayes’ “Movement Memos” podcast about “switching costs,” why it’s so hard to move people to a new platform, and what platforms can do to mitigate those costs.

Also, Mastodon just seems a little too nerdy for the general public if I’m being honest 😬

Ah the joys of being a woman online! It’s either “tits or GTFO” or “OMG I saw a titty, will no one think of the children?!”

God forbid you want to make money off showing the tits, because that tends to piss off the “tits or GTFO” crowd for some reason 🧐

I don’t take offense to the terminology, I’m just saddened and disheartened by the fact that so many people seem to care more about not seeing nudes on their TL than they do about whether or not the people posting them can make enough money to live.

Tbh I take offense to your statement that you’ll be happy to see us off Twitter when you could simply adjust your sensitive content filter or idk…keep scrolling? You could also click the top right of the post and choose “show less content like this” or whatever. You can mute and block users who post content you don’t want to see. You can report users who spam the comment sections of unrelated posts with their links/thirst traps. (I think this is fine to do bc I see it as bad etiquette to spam people’s replies.)

Ugh so much pressure! 😭 I have some very smart colleagues who have written pieces on these issues. I will try to compile a few in a post here soon.

Yeah, we’ll see. I made my account a year ago but abandoned it. It’s super hard to maintain all these damn social media platforms, and BlueSky was not taking off because of the silly “invite only” gatekeeping. Switching cost is a major barrier. I think they’ve done a bit to address that with the “starter packs” option that allows people to mass follow or mass block curated lists.

This is the first time I’ve seen a push from so many well-known SWs with large followings to move over, so it feels a bit more significant.

I should have clarified that I don’t plan on leaving Twitter. I remain firm in my commitment to ride that bitch til the wheels fall off. They will have to remove me. But I am trying to migrate as much of my following over there as possible.

And as for whether it will be a SW haven: it won’t. None of these platforms are. If it’s good for us, it will be good until it isn’t. It’s just the way of things for us. The only way to survive as a SW is to make peace with the fact that you might wake up one day and find your primary source of income gone, either because the platform was seized or they changed TOU and/or you get deleted.

Regarding Mastodon, I just feel like it’s too nerdy for the general public. We had a Mastodon instance called Switter but we never really had clients embrace it like they do the mainstream platforms.

I agree. Dorsey’s Twitter was probably the best we’ll ever get. I’m sure he’s a piece of shit like the rest of them, but the golden days of Twitter were something else. We shall never see their like again 💔

Siiiiiigh

“Thirstposting” aka “Desperately trying to make enough money to buy groceries and pay rent.”

I understand people’s frustration with seeing content they don’t want to see, especially when my colleagues spam their shit under unrelated posts. But the reason so many SWs resort to spam is that every platform deboosts us to the point that our own followers can’t see our posts.

I always follow platform rules regarding marking my content/profile sensitive, 18+, NSFW etc but every platform still restricts my ability to reach people who do want to see me!! We used to be able to just build a following organically because a lot of people on the internet actually do want to see tits and ass.

Adjust your sensitive content filters. 🤷🏼‍♀️ We need to eat. Most of us don’t want to be social media influencers; we were forced to start advertising on Twitter because Kamala Harris went after Backpage and Congress passed FOSTA/SESTA in 2018.

Can you elaborate? I didn’t even know Reddit existed back then